Everyone wants green computing.
Mobile users demand maximum performance and battery life. Businesses and governments increasingly require systems that are powerful yet environmentally friendly. And cloud services must respond to global demands without making the grid stutter.
For these reasons and more, green computing has evolved rapidly over the past three decades, and it's here to stay.
What Is Green Computing? Green computing, or sustainable computing, is the practice of maximizing energy efficiency and minimizing environmental impact in the ways computer chips, systems and software are designed and used.
Also called green information technology, green IT or sustainable IT, green computing spans concerns across the supply chain, from the raw materials used to make computers to how systems get recycled.
In their working lives, green computers must deliver the most work for the least energy, typically measured by performance per watt.
Why Is Green Computing Important? Green computing is a significant tool to combat climate change, the existential threat of our time.
Global temperatures have risen about 1.2 C over the last century. As a result, ice caps are melting, causing sea levels to rise about 20 centimeters and increasing the number and severity of extreme weather events.
The rising use of electricity is one of the causes of global warming. Data centers represent a small fraction of total electricity use, about 1% or 200 terawatt-hours per year, but they're a growing factor that demands attention.
Powerful, energy-efficient computers are part of the solution. They're advancing science and our quality of life, including the ways we understand and respond to climate change.
What Are the Elements of Green Computing? Engineers know green computing is a holistic discipline.
Energy efficiency is a full-stack issue, from the software down to the chips, said Sachin Idgunji, co-chair of the power working group for the industry's MLPerf AI benchmark and a distinguished engineer working on performance analysis at NVIDIA.
For example, in one analysis he found NVIDIA DGX A100 systems delivered a nearly 5x improvement in energy efficiency in scale-out AI training benchmarks compared to the prior generation.
My primary role is analyzing and improving energy efficiency of AI applications at everything from the GPU and the system node to the full data center scale, he said.
Idgunji's work is a job description for a growing cadre of engineers building products from smartphones to supercomputers.
What's the History of Green Computing? Green computing hit the public spotlight in 1992, when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency launched Energy Star, a program for identifying consumer electronics that met standards in energy efficiency.
The Energy Star logo is now used across more than three dozen product groups. A 2017 report found nearly 100 government and industry programs across 22 countries promoting what it called green ICTs, sustainable information and communication technologies.
One such organization, the Green Electronics Council, provides the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool, a registry of systems and their energy-efficiency levels. The council claims it's saved nearly 400 million megawatt-hours of electricity through use of 1.5 billion green products it's recommended to date.
Work on green computing continues across the industry at every level.
For example, some large data centers use liquid-cooling while others locate data centers where they can use cool ambient air. Schneider Electric recently released a whitepaper recommending 23 metrics for determining the sustainability level of data centers.
Data centers need to consider energy and water use as well as greenhouse gas emissions and waste to measure their sustainability, according to a Schneider whitepaper. A Pioneer in Energy Efficiency Wu Feng, a computer science professor at Virginia Tech, built a career pushing the limits of green computing. It started out of necessity while he was working at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
A computer cluster for open science research he maintained in an external warehouse had twice as many failures in summers versus winters. So, he built a lower-power system that wouldn't generate as much heat.
The Green Destiny supercomputer He demoed the system, dubbed Green Destiny, at the Supercomputing conference in 2001. Covered by the BBC, CNN and the New York Times, among others, it sparked years of talks and debates in the HPC community about the potential reliability as well as efficiency of green computing.
Interest rose as supercomputers and data centers grew, pushing their boundaries in power consumption. In November 2007, after working with some 30 HPC luminaries and gathering community feedback, Feng launched the first Green500 List, the industry's benchmark for energy-efficient supercomputing.
A Green Computing Benchmark The Green500 became a rallying point for a community that needed to reign in power consumption while taking performance to new heights.
Energy efficiency increased exponentially, flops per watt doubled about every year and a half for the greenest supercomputer at the top of the list, said Feng.
By some measures, the results showed the energy efficiency of the world's greenest systems increased two orders of magnitude in the last 14 years.
The Green500 showed that heterogeneous systems - those with accelerators like GPUs in addition to CPUs - are consistently the most energy-efficient ones. Feng attributes the gains mainly to the use of accelerators such as GPUs, now common among the world's fastest systems.
Accelerators added the capability to execute code in a massively parallel way without a lot of overhead - they let us run blazingly fast, he said.
He cited two generations of
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Everyone wants green computing.
